1. Field of the Invention
Aspects of the present invention relate to image processing and information manipulation. More specifically, aspects of the present invention relate to obtaining and using context information related to selected content.
2. Description of Related Art
People mark-up documents. For electronic documents, people commonly print them out and annotate them with highlighters, pens, tape flags, and the like. While a document has significance by itself, the reader having made annotations has effectively indicated which sections are the most relevant to him. These annotations are generally graphical in nature and do not always transition well to a textual equivalent.
In the computing world, however, attempting to capture annotations and related markups in an electronic fashion can be cumbersome. Typical computer systems do not provide an easy interface for capturing and conveying graphically intensive content. Rather, they are optimized for capturing and rendering text. For instance, typical computer systems, especially computer systems using graphical user interface (GUI) systems, such as Microsoft WINDOWS, are optimized for accepting user input from one or more discrete input devices such as a keyboard for entering text, and a pointing device such as a mouse with one or more buttons for driving the user interface.
Some computing systems have expanded the input and interaction systems available to a user by allowing the use of a stylus to input information into the systems. The stylus may take the place of both the keyboard (for data entry) as well as the mouse (for control). Some computing systems receive handwritten electronic information or electronic ink and immediately attempt to convert the electronic ink into text. Other systems permit the electronic ink to remain in the handwritten form.
Despite the existence of a stylus, providing a user's annotations and other markups back to a user in an efficient manner is difficult. While one may view thumbnails of a document with annotations, the corresponding annotations and related content is shrunk to fit within each thumbnail. For annotation and markup heavy documents, the thumbnails may be useless. Accordingly, a better solution for providing content to a user is needed.